How The Crew was ported to PlayStation 4

Ubisoft Reflections rounded off day two of last week's Develop conference with an intriguing talk, tantalisingly entitled "Tips and Tricks for Porting to Next-Gen". For Digital Foundry, it was a must-see presentation primarily because the vast majority - and perhaps even all - of the multi-platform games we'll be playing on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 by the end of the year have been derived from PC code, necessitating some level of porting across to the new hardware.
(PC, PS4, The Crew, Xbox One)

"The PS4's GPU is very programmable. There's a lot of power in there that we're just not using yet. So what we want to do are some PS4-specific things for our rendering but within reason - it's a cross-platform game so we can't do too much that's PS4-specific," he reveals. So much power not used yet sweet!!

PS4 version could have a stable framerate or even higher at least. That's not adding any features just showing the spare power for what they built. A man values framerate over resolution (within reason) anyway so he will take PS4 being more stable on multiplat games as a result of not being pushed as much as X1.

See! This is why I'm against having 2 main consoles. Competition is great, except in the gaming world. If we had the PS4 and the PS4 only, it would be like the PS2 days all over again. Imagine all Ubisoft, Activision, 2K,etc all taking the extra time to really push the PS4. I think we'd actually see innovation this way instead of holding out on stuff so that Xboner can catch up

Well said. Microsoft isn't contributing to this industry enough to get so much support from third parties imo. Nintendo at least goes it's own way and brings enough first party support to make third parties almost dispensable.

^^^ Agreed, Micro$oft is a cancerous tumor to the industry, and needs to be cut off.. Ps4, and Nintendo would be great,. Each doing their own thing,.. The whole industry has started to stagnate, and go down hill, ever since M$ came on to the scene.

But wasn't it the same think back then since the PS2 was holding back GC and og Xbox ports? imo lets just wait for the first-party games to do the talking, I'm excited to see what ND and MM have behind the curtains for the PS4.

And now you can see why PC gamers have been getting shafted for years now with multiplat games, and why PC gamers are so angry about it - You have superior hardware that is not used to it's full potential, due to the industry having to use the "lowest common denominator" and system parity as a guideline.

Of course, PC games tend to have higher graphics options, I am more referring to the lack of content or the scope of games in general.

I miss that too. And the third party studios are selling games regardless, so who cares if one platform looks decidedly better than the other. They don't have obligations to the platform holders' situations, so just take advantage of what's in front of you.

Where are all the people who said Mark Cerny was lying now, about how easily PC games can be ported to PS4 in a matter of months. I think if 2-3 people can do it in 6 months that just about validates his claims.

Seeing as the developers of Warframe another small team did it in 3 months.. You really need more proof he is not making this stuff up just for PR?

This was a really interesting read...it seems that the PS4 has lot of tools that give you what you want without many compromises, its just written in different code...also the dev environment seems mature and easy to access....multi-plat games should run better than on the PS3 during it's initial launch

Most of man's PS3 games are first party (other than PS+ downloads) he just loves the work they do compared to third party companies. Not to say 3rd party doesn't have gems (a man is looking forward to getting GTA5, Watch Dogs, and BF4 this Fall alone) but first party games from Sony get revisited by a man more than any 3rd party game apart from Arkham.

"The PS4's GPU is very programmable. There's a lot of power in there that we're just not using yet. So what we want to do are some PS4-specific things for our rendering but within reason - it's a cross-platform game so we can't do too much that's PS4-specific,"

They just openly admitted that they're going to downgrade the game to stay in line with the X1. Clearly they're not talking about the Wiiu here. That policy looks like it's still in place I'm afraid. Holding tech back for the sake of parity isn't a good sign for next gen from 3rd party developers. Having said that, it still looks fantastic though. :)

No, they didn't. They simply said that they are going to add some things, but only within reason.

It's the same thing that happens on PC. We get better versions for sure, but it's not like they spend the time to create a vastly different game for us even though our hardware is several times more powerful than the consoles.

There is no policy to downgrade PS3 or PS4 games. The PS3 was difficult to work with and actually had a slightly weaker GPU and less available RAM than the 360...THAT is the reason multiplats sometimes suffered on the PS3, not because developers held back the PS3 versions. Don't be silly.

He said they can't do too many ps4 specific things.. They also can't do too many Xbox specific things.. Absolutely nothing about that says the game is held back due to Xbox.. But I expect nothing g less from this site

According to Cerny, PS4 addresses the hiccups that can come from the communication between CPU, GPU, and RAM in a traditional PC. "A typical PC GPU has two buses," Cerny told Gamasutra in a very detailed technical write-up. "There's a bus the GPU uses to access VRAM, and there is a second bus that goes over the PCI Express that the GPU uses to access system memory. But whichever bus is used, the internal caches of the GPU become a significant barrier to CPU/GPU communication--any time the GPU wants to read information the CPU wrote, or the GPU wants to write information so that the CPU can see it, time-consuming flushes of the GPU internal caches are required."

PS4 addresses these concerns by adding another bus to the GPU "that allows it to read directly from system memory or write directly to system memory, bypassing its own L1 and L2 caches." The end result is that it removes synchronization issues between the CPU and GPU. "We can pass almost 20 gigabytes a second down that bus," Cerny said, pointing out that it's "larger than the PCIe on most PCs!"

What that means in term of DBZ power level terms? Instant transmission for GPU and CPU to the GDDR5. They both have their own "doorway" so to speak. GDDR5 latency irrelevant.

" But whichever bus is used, the internal caches of the GPU become a significant barrier to CPU/GPU communication--any time the GPU wants to read information the CPU wrote, or the GPU wants to write information so that the CPU can see it, time-consuming flushes of the GPU internal caches are required."

PS4 addresses these concerns by adding another bus to the GPU "that allows it to read directly from system memory or write directly to system memory, bypassing its own L1 and L2 caches." The end result is that it removes synchronization issues between the CPU and GPU. "We can pass almost 20 gigabytes a second down that bus," Cerny said, pointing out that it's "larger than the PCIe on most PCs!"

Corpser - Read the two paragraphs above and then tell me how it's like a PC setup. (Hint: the quoted material specifically states how it isn't)

Stop reading what you want to read. He CLEARLY states "We can pass almost 20 gigabytes a second down that bus,".

All he is saying is that it has a secondary bus that allows communication directly between the two, instead of going through the middle man. That speeds it up, but it still can't travel at the full speed of GDDR5 due to bottle necking of the bus, so it is still similar to a PC in that it can only use the amount of speed similar to that of DDR3, and the GPU can still theoretically use the full speed of GDDR5. What isn't there to understand?

Anus- The bandwidth assigned to each pipeline being similar doesn't mean that the architecture is the same. The difference between this and PC architecture is the fact that both the CPU and GPU can use the same data sets stored in the ram instead of copying from one allocation to the other.

This was known, wasn't it? Well, 20GB/s is a bit on the slow side, but a cpu is dead in the water moving data around anyway. Ever tried to switch off caches in a PC? No matter how fast your RAM is, it'll not gonna work reading/writing without caches on. "Slow" is relative. It's still as fast as it is in e.g. the PS3 (or most PCs these days) and what it basically means "your PCIe" runs at the full speed of your memory. Quite usable in a "non-cacheable" configuration (this is pure non-cacheable bandwidth). The main purpose is communication between CPU & GPU - not "sharing" data. That's what you have shared memory for. You can share addresses and hand data over. You can allow a shared memory buffer (e.g. command buffers) and make them as big as you like.

The CPU can also do "cache snooping" in the CPUs cache area to allow for cache coherency. But this would generate overhead in such a configuration because if a CPU writes to an address through it's caches where the GPU is "listening" to (snooping) it will force the memory controller to flush caches to make sure those data end up in the proper location in memory and in return the GPU must load those again.

The direct bus cuts this short and does not (!) require a cache flush - which means, it has no impact on general purpose code - a cache flush does! It is basically a 20GB/s buffered CPU-GPU interconnect.

honestly, this game looks boring. Sure it'll be fun the first several times. but what then? its not really a racer.. and you just have so many missions driving cars and bashing them against each other.. its like twisted metal with no guns.

With the porting time frame much lower on the PS4, the game library is gonna fill up even quicker than the PS1 and PS2 game libraries did.....good job on sony's part for learning from their mistakes with the PS3 in every way possible.

You are the one insulting me yet you are the one calling me a 13 year old trash talker? It is clear from all the stats from everyone including Microsoft that the ps4 has more power than the XBone. It seems that the facts have upset you and I can only hope that you stop being a bitter fanboy. I will be buying the PS4 and the XBone on release date just like I own a ps3 and Xbox 360 one now. For this current generation I buy multiplat games on Xbox 360 as I know games developers port the games from Xbox to the ps3 and the ps3 ports suffer because of this. I would say yes I am a fanboy but not a fanboy of Sony or Microsoft I am a fan of good games no matter what console they are released on. And if the PS4 can make the games look and play better than the XBone then that is what I want.